Trump Cheerleader Stephen Moore Under Consideration for Position at the National Economic Council

Stephen Moore

Stephen Moore, is reportedly under consideration as a senior adviser on President Donald Trump's National Economic Council, reports CNBC.

When word leaked that Moore was under consideration by Trump for a position on the Federal Reserve Board, the attacks ensued, with justification.


Jonathan Chait wrote:

Stephen Moore’s career as an economic analyst has been a decades-long continuous procession of error and hackery. It is not despite but precisely because of these errors that Moore now finds himself in the astonishing position of having been offered a position on the Federal Reserve board by President Trump.

 George Selgin wrote:

Of many dubious claims that recent Federal Reserve Board nominee Stephen Moore made in a Wall Street Journal op-ed he published a couple weeks ago, perhaps the most startling was his claim that "to break the crippling inflation of the 1970s," former Fed chair Paul Volcker linked Fed monetary policy to real-time changes in commodity prices. When commodity prices rose, Mr. Volcker saw inflation coming and increased interest rates. When commodities fell in price, he lowered rates.

Of course it's true that, in the early 1980s (not the late 1970s), Paul Volcker's Fed finally reigned-in the U.S. inflation rate. It's also true that the Dodd-Frank Act's section 619 implements a "Volcker Rule" barring banks from using customer deposits to engage in various kinds of proprietary trading. But I dare say it will be news to most people, as it was to me, that Volcker's Fed tamed inflation by following another "Volcker Rule" that strictly geared its policy rate to the observed level of the prices of various commodities.

Don Boudreaux wrote:

Stephen Moore’s defense of Trump’s punitive taxes on Americans who buy goods assembled in China reads like a defense-lawyer’s brief for a guilty client (“Trump will win the China trade war,” Dec. 18). It’s disappointingly devoid of serious analysis and marred with logical contradictions.

He would have never survived the Senate nomination process. His name was pulled as a prospective Fed nominee.

But at NEC, the call is Trump's. Congressional approval is not required.  And the NEC director Larry Kudlow is close to Moore.

It could happen. That is, yet another sycophant for Trump who will attempt to justify any harebrained Trump economic idea. Not at all the type of person that should be around Trump.

-RW